is well chosen; pigment and colour are here subordinated too visibly to preoccupations of form for us to exact much on that head, when the designer has given all, or nearly all, under another.  Moreover, the work in that field accomplished with such force results in rendering nature exactly as she is, in her reliefs, her nuances, and her power, and almost in her mysteries.  It is not possible to aim at a more circumscribed but more formal result and attain it with more success.  People say Paul Potter’s Bull, and that is not enough, I assure you:  they might say The Bull, and, in my opinion, that would be the greatest eulogy that could be bestowed upon this work, so mediocre in its weak parts and yet so decisive.

    Les Maitres d’Autrefois (Paris, 1876)

CORESUS AND CALLIRHOE

(FRAGONARD)

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT

Poets were lacking in the last century.  I do not say rhymers, versifiers and mechanical arrangers of words; I say poets.  Poetry, taking the expression in the truth and height of its meaning; poetry, which is an elevation or an enchantment of the imagination, the contribution of an ideal of reverie or gaiety to human thought; poetry, which carries away and suspends above the world the soul of a period and the spirit of a people, was unknown to the France of the Eighteenth Century, and her two only poets were two painters:  Watteau and Fragonard.

Watteau, the man of the North, the child of Flanders, the great poet of Love! the master of sweet serenity and tender Paradises, whose work may be likened to the Elysian Field of Passion!  Watteau, the melancholy enchanter who has made nature sigh so heavily in his autumn woods, full of regret around dreamful pleasure!  Watteau, the Pensieroso of the Regency; Fragonard, the little poet of the Art of Love of the time.

Have you noticed in L’Embarquement de Cythere all those naked little forms of saucy and knavish Loves half lost in the heights of the sky?  Where are they going?  They are going to play at Fragonard’s and to put on his palette the hues of their butterfly wings.

[Illustration:  CORESUS AND CALLIRHOE.
        Fragonard.]

Fragonard is the bold narrator, the gallant amoroso, the rogue with Gallic malice, nearly Italian in genius but French in spirit; the man of foreshortened mythology and roguish undress, of skies made rosy by the flesh of goddesses and alcoves lighted with female nudity.